foleyavatarhappy2005-06-10

One of the designers of Space Quest, (the 2 guys from Andromeda) claimed on the back of the game box that he was a wanted man. His alleged crime was ‘excessive verbosity’. As a 7 year old, I never really understood what he meant by that, or even after looking up the words in a dictionary what he was getting at. Perhaps it is just this: concision. Describing things in a succinct and concise manner is always the preferable way to go, whether you are making a text-heavy CGA adventure game, a 900 page novel, or a 4 panel comic strip. Don’t waste words!

To wit: some of the jokes/dialog that we’ve written in the past is lengthy, but there’s always a need for the words I feel. I’ve often struggled to simplify and express something with as few words as possible, but it isn’t always easy or possible to make it a one-liner. So there are 2 choices in that case i guess: a) keep the text b) use fewer ideas. I think the answer is that either can be correct depending on the material, and sometimes a compromise between both is necessary. Of course I can make myself feel better by spewing forth a page of verbal diarrhea in this forum. Now if only we could make this shit funny…

I don’t really watch StarGate, but the boy seems to like it and really, who can deny Mr. Richard Dean Anderson’s magnetism? Oh MacGyver…

Best Space Quest game? My favourite was 3, especially with the comparatively early diss of Bill Gates and Microsoft. Hell, I played that game on a DOS machine – No Windows, not even DOS Shell. If your favourite was anything above 3, you should probably be lynched by the scrotum. I’m assuming no females have that little taste in video games.

Seriously, I could rant for an hour about the death of the graphical text adventure in favour of the ‘easy point and click interface’ that arose in games of that era (Space Quest 4, King’s Quest 5, Police Quest 3, etc). A completely open ended system where you could compel your character to do whatever bidding your mind could conceive of was swept away in favour of 6 or so fucking icons that had to fit every situation within the game. The imaginations of both the game player and designers were thus stifled, and those games began to SUCK. With the text based commands, in moments of desperation you could always type in “suck off Manannan”, or “offer Giant a handjob”. Okay, so it never got you anywhere, but it was amusing. With the point and click system the best you could do would be to choose the “grab” action to turn your mouse pointer into a fist and then vainly click on the Giant’s crotch. And they wonder why this genre died out.